The Absurd of Idealism

A more careful reading of the novel Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes shows us that unlike Sancho Panza, who is obsessed with the idea of enrichment, Don Quixote is obsessed with the idea that the order of the world should be grounde on: social justice and elimination of the oppression.

 “I came to the world to remove the injustice”, always says Don Quixote, for who the true purpose of life is not his own fame, but the benefits that his actions may cause.

And, through so many deprivation, suffering and humiliation, he continues to fight and suffer for the others, to distroy evil and to triumph truth and righteousness.

The character of Don Quixote is built up of a sums of moral values, showing all the time generosity, courage, renunciation, soul purity, disinterest, stoicism, tendency to action and, in general, the ideal to achieve himself in good and beautiful. In this regard, Don Quixote is one of the most beautiful characters that the Renaissance literature had created.

On the other hand, the hero misses these nobile ideals, as shown in the episode of the battle against the windmills, as well as from the other subsequent episodes, mainly for three reasons: he doesn’t fit his deeds into true necessities, doesn’t know how to pursue his intentions according to his real possibilities and the ideals he wants to implement don’t correspond to the concrete circumstances.

But Cervantes emphasizes the hero’s ensemble of moral virtues because in his conception what serves the moral and social progress of mankind is precisely these virtues. Cervantes’s humanist cultural attitude manifests itself particularly in those hero’s speeches, whose eloquence then proceeds with a perfect clarity of logic and purity of expresion.

In the novel is also presented the general decline of Spain, a decline that is severely judged. The leaders of Spain, about whom Sancho says “he doesn’t give a damn about them”, just think of stealing and spending the wealth of the country. Instead of any virtues they display their arrogance, forgetting that the true nobility is based on virtue; the noble rank is inherited, but virtue is conquered.

Neither the other stancheon of the Spanish state, the Church, is forgiven. The priests of that time were said to be small in their hearts, that they only think about food and urge the rich to be hunks.

Finally, Cervantes’s true democratism is in the attention he pays to the characters of the people, very numoerous and varied, objectively presented, defective, but in who beautiful moral attributes predominate.

from Cristina Ionescu, Renasterea in Spania

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